Travis Bedel’s Homo Plantae aesthetic

Mixed media artist Travis Bedel, who creates stunning collages that merge anatomical imagery with illustrations from science guides and textbooks, was profiled recently over at This Is Colossal.

In my study of the work of American poet Ronald Johnson, I looked at the particular conceptual work Johnson was doing when he compared “the human body” to plants in his modernist verse. I put “the human body” in quotes here because, as you might imagine, the universal human body that Johnson gorgeously, lyrically sings in its green seediness is a male body, unspokenly white — the model humanbody of a certain kind of scientific vision.

Nearly 50 years later, Bedel’s aesthetic sits squarely in the same zone as Johnson (who was also a collagist). If my man RJ had worked in digital visual collage, he might well have made this. I wonder if, like Johnson, Bedel is also a concurrent practitioner of a more leather, motorcycle, Bear vibe. For me the two will forever go hand in hand.